Tagged With passwords

Still using BitTorrent to exclusively download legally acquired content such as operating system images or files you want to share privately with friends? If so, you might want to double-check your security settings to protect yourself from what researchers at Google's Project Zero are calling a "low complexity hack" affecting Transmission and other popular BitTorrent clients. The flaw could leave your computer vulnerable to control by malicious hackers, but you can protect yourself by following a few steps until official fixes are in place.

The sign up processes for online banking accounts, new email addresses, or health insurance apps all involve a few extra security measures to protect the precious data inside those accounts. Unfortunately, the security questions they make you answer aren't exactly secure. Your mother's maiden name just won't cut it anymore and, according to the New York Times, might cost you your credit score if someone gains access to your personal information. It's time to strengthen your security questions to keep the bad guys out of your accounts.

Predicting the future is near impossible -- but that doesn‘t stop us all from having a red hot go. Human beings have been predicting the future since the beginning of history and the results range from the hilarious to the downright uncanny.

One thing all future predictions have in common: they‘re rooted in our current understanding of how the world works. It‘s difficult to escape that mindset. We have no idea how technology will evolve, so our ideas are connected to the technology of today.

If you have two-factor authentication set up on your Twitter account (which you absolutely should and if you don't you should set up right now), then now you don't have to have to use SMS to get access to your account.

You know those corny movie scenes, where someone hacks their boss or girlfriend or enemy's password by looking around the room and making two guesses? In real life, that would work way more often than it should. Check out this list of the 25 most-used, and thus most hackable, passwords of 2017.

If you had any doubts that criminals were in investing in technology, then this will allay those concerns. By aggregating the data from over 250 separate breaches, cybercriminals have created an easily accessed and usable treasure trove with 1.4 billion clear text log-in credentials according to security researchers 4iQ. If you're in the habit of reusing your credentials then this aggregated, interactive database which lets criminals query and receive responses in under a second should have you worried.

You know by now that you absolutely need a password manager. But you never get around to buying one. Let's fix that right now with RememBear, a new password manager that's easy to install and figure out. We tested it, and while we still prefer 1Password for most users, we recommend RememBear for beginners, especially during its free beta period.

Mac users running the latest version of Apple's operating system, High Sierra, are susceptible to a pretty huge flaw that could grant anyone with physical access to your Mac unfettered access to everything on your machine. The hack seems to be affecting only macOS High Sierra 10.13 and 10.13.1 versions. Luckily, Apple has now issued a fix.

Hopefully you took advantage of Microsoft's free upgrade offer that allowed consumers to update computers running Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 (and if you didn't, it isn't too late!). If you did, you should take advantage of one of the most convenient and downright pleasant features in Windows 10: The ability to login by simply looking at your PC, using Windows Hello. It's easy to setup, but may cost you a few bucks depending on the PC and accessories you currently own.

Phishing attacks, wherein scammers pretend to be legitimate companies in order to trick you into handing over sensitive information such as usernames, passwords or credit card information, are getting more difficult to spot. Even Google is susceptible to more sophisticated attacks, which have popped up everywhere from email attachments to shared Google documents.

No doubt you've Googled yourself at least once to see what comes up (or to see what embarrassing photos and blog posts you need to purge from the web before your boss finds them). While doing a search for yourself might yield some predictable results -- your LinkedIn page, any mentions of you in the local paper, obituaries for other people with the same name -- a conversation with a friend on the topic of data breaches led me to search for something I rarely need to find: my own iCloud email address.

Today I got two friendly alerts from Have I Been Pwned, a free service that tracks data breaches and tells you if your info was exposed. It told me that my old passwords for Kickstarter and Bitly, breached in 2014, were now publicly available (though encrypted) online.

A while back, I woke up to find my Android phone lingering at a pattern unlock screen. Not just to unlock my screen, but a prompt to decrypt all of my phone's data. I was puzzled. Every other morning, I decrypted my device using a 10-digit, alphanumeric passphrase -- something I perceived, accurately, as being infinitely more secure than tracing a dumb pattern with my finger.

The US government recently revamped its password recommendations, abandoning its endorsement of picking a favourite phrase and replacing a couple characters with symbols, like c4tlo^eR. These short, hard-to-read passwords look complicated to humans but very very simple to computers.

Cybercrime is growing, and anyone can fall victim to ransomware, data dumping, and the like. That's why it's important now more than ever to ensure your online accounts are secure, and while there are plenty of tools out there to help you do so, few can match what RoboForm Everywhere brings to the table.

Police in South Australia are looking for the right to compel users to give up passwords to computers in order to access encrypted information. With the federal government already looking for ways to force tech companies to unlock devices, it seems that things are escalating when it comes to the rights for law enforcement to access our devices.

No company, be it a startup or a conglomerate, has a perfect security system. Chipotle's payment system was hacked, OneLogin experienced a data breach, and even Google had a run in with a bad phishing exploit that left thousands of accounts compromised from a shared document. In other words, I'm wary about giving any info to companies that don't have a track record of keeping it safe.

Although storing passwords in plaintext anywhere online is fundamentally the opposite of security, routine data breaches at some of the world's biggest companies haven't dissuaded some users from engaging in this obviously terrible practice.

OneLogin, an identity management software company, announced yesterday that it suffered a data breach. Although the firm hasn't provided many details, the few that it has released suggest that the breach is extensive.

One of the primary vehicles used by bad guys to access our systems is stealing log-in credentials in order to impersonate real users. All the security processes and tools in the world are circumvented when someone has your username and password. That's where two-factor authentication (2FA) comes into play. 2FA works by adding another authentication challenge to the equation. It's not just about what you know - your password, it's also about something you have. That's where the authenticator apps from Microsoft and Google come into play.